that it is either senseless or false. If ‘because I want’ means that it is want or desire which moves me to act, then it is senseless; because, while professing to tell us something, it merely repeats ‘I do what I want.’ But if ‘because I want’ means that I do everything as a means to an end, which I represent to myself as the feeling of my private satisfaction, then it is false, and it is grossly false.
Let us dwell on this point, for to do so will repay us. (1) Everybody knows that there are actions which we say we do without a motive; there are acts, in the first place, not preceded even by the (conscious) idea of the act to be done; and in the second place (and these latter are more important), there are acts which are done thinkingly and on purpose, and which yet are done without any ulterior intent beyond the act itself. In both of these cases we have no motive before our minds, no thought of any end to be reached, out of and beyond the act itself; and here for our minds there is no ‘because’—we do what we want, and it is simply a mistake to suppose that in and for our minds there is another or further end represented, which suggests the act, or to which the act is a means. (2) And where we act, as we say, with a motive, where we have in our minds a reason, an aim, an object beyond the act, which the act subserves, there these motives, these thoughts of ends or objects to be realized, are of very different kinds. The motive to the act may be the thought of another particular act, or of the whole of a complex scheme; it may be the idea of an end which my action is to bring about, the pleasure or the happiness, the pain or the ruin of another; in a word, the idea of any event the thought of whose realization by certain means excites desire or want, and so is a motive. In none of all these is the thought of my future feeling of satisfaction what I have before me: but this again may be my motive, and sometimes is. The pleasant feeling which is to result from an act may be presented in imagination, and thought of as the end to be reached; or the thought of myself to be pleased as much as possible generally, and here by such means and in such a way, may be the end which I take as the principle and motive of my action.
Let us illustrate the above: I may eat because I am hungry, instinctively and unconsciously, or simply purposing to eat this or
